Gang of ‘maids’ busted: How women worked in pairs, robbed posh south Delhi homes

Delhi Police arrested five women of a gang who allegedly posed as house helps and carried out thefts. The arrested women operated in areas including Hauz Khas, New Friends Colony and Greater Kailash.

delhiUpdated: Nov 30, 2017 13:53 IST

Shubhomoy Sikdar

Hindustan Times

Delhi Police crime branch personnel show valuables recovered from the five women who were arrested in New Delhi on Wednesday.(Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)

The Delhi Police Crime Branch on Tuesday caught five members of a gang who allegedly stole cash and jewellery worth crores from houses in Delhi-NCR.

The arrested women allegedly operated in areas including Hauz Khas, New Friends Colony and Greater Kailash. Police said they gained entry into the houses by posing as house helps and then carried out the theft with the help of an accomplice.

The thefts were allegedly carried out in pairs where one woman was the help and the other posed as her relative. The ‘relative’ used a range of gimmicks — from tips on meditation to using magic or prayers to solve common problems — to distract the members of the employer’s family while the help broke open the locks and stole valuables, the police said.

The police have now arrested seven women in connection with nine thefts reported in Delhi and Noida over the past one year and seized jewellery worth Rs1 crore from them, said DCP (Crime) G Ram Gopal Naik.

The police added that the some gang members had earlier sold valuables and used the money to build houses in Bihar. The gang even bought a car to ferry the maids.

“The Crime Branch was tasked with probing cases of thefts in posh areas where the modus operandi of the thieves was the same. In all these cases, the households had hired a woman who approached them and after working for a month, she would decamp with cash and jewellery with the help of an accomplice,” said Naik.

On how they zeroed in on a house, Naik said the gang members would conduct recce in different parts of the city and spoke to security guards and other staff members to find out the requirement for a house help.

“Once they identified a house which had a requirement for a house help, they requested the security guard or driver to introduce them to the owner of the house. They even offered to work for free for a week and asked for lower wages than the usual rates. If hired on an experimental basis, they worked hard to win the trust of the employer while also identifying spots where cash and valuables were kept,” said Naik.

The theft

After the domestic help had worked for a considerable period of time, say a month, an accomplice would come to visit her claiming to be her sister or a distant relative. In most cases, it was the visitor who would engage the people in the house, the police said.

Another investigator said the visit was timed in a way that few members were present or were scattered in the house.

“The maid meanwhile had enough time to even shut the doors of the room where she would steal the items, claiming to be dusting the rooms — something that the distracted house owners did not notice. They were well experienced to not pick the artificial jewellery,” said Naik.

Arrest

Naik said that on November 25, they had a tip off that some of the accused involved in several of the house thefts/burglaries would be arriving near Ghazipur Bus Depot to plan further similar offences.

“Accordingly, the team acted swiftly and a raid was conducted to nab the accused persons. The team was successful in arresting five female members of the gang who were found involved in nine cases of burglary and house thefts in Delhi-NCR. Two others had been arrested earlier,” said Naik.